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Her name was Ima, Ima Fish. She was a Betta that I got when my son was four months old and I decided being a stay-at-home mom wasn’t for me. So, when my old boss called me and asked me if I wanted to come back part-time, I jumped at the chance. I bought Ima to put on my desk at the office. I had that little fish on that desk for five years! And everyone in the office knew Ima. If I was out of the office, I knew someone else was taking care of it, I didn’t even have to ask. Coworkers would stop by my desk daily to see how Ima was, even before they’d check to see how I was. Ima became the office fish.
Employees spend a large portion of their time at work, away from their families. Coworkers often become a second family. So how can employers create a work space that helps to bring people together?
It starts at the top. Leadership can help create an environment that brings people together by making connections with those who work for them. Get to know your employees, what makes them tick outside of work. Do they have families? What are their hobbies? Where do they see themselves in the future? When you check in with employees, don’t jump straight into work, ask them how their weekend was, if they have plans for the holidays, just take a few minutes to chat and get to know more about them. By doing this, you not only build a better connection with your team members but you are encouraging them to do the same with each other.
A lot of work and a little play. Allow for some down time at work. You’d be surprised at how that may actually improve productivity and it will definitely boost morale. Early in my career I worked for a company that had an office breakfast EVERY Friday. And it was employee provided. There was a sign-up sheet each quarter for those who wanted to participate and a schedule was made of what Friday you had to provide breakfast. It was great, people loved to participate and every Friday the entire office of about 50 employees came through the breakroom to grab breakfast. You could bring whatever you wanted and there was always an abundance of food. Good food! We even had one employee who when it was his turn, would bring his griddle from home and make made-to-order breakfast sandwiches. And while you were waiting on your sandwich, you’d get to have the best conversations with him.
Create welcoming spaces for connection and collaboration. One of the worst feelings for me is walking into a sterile work space, devoid of color, personalization, and warmth. It’s not inviting. Create spaces where employees want to be, that inspires them. A little décor can go a long way. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Add a few pictures, some fake or real plants, some color. Take that bright white break room and turn it into a space employees want to sit and enjoy lunch or a quick break. A little paint can go a long way to making a space more welcoming, so get rid of that bright white! And while you’re at it, take away the clutter too. It creates stress and don’t we all have enough of that these days?
What can you do to make your work space bring people together?
“If there’s something stirring in you now, and you know what it is, do that. There’s no need to overthink it. A mistake here and there isn’t going to kill you, so don’t waste time worrying about that. It’s infinitely better to fail with courage than to sit idle with fear, because only one of these gives you the slightest chance to live abundantly. And if you do fail, then the worst-case scenario is that you’ll learn something from it. You’re for sure not going to learn jack squat from sitting still and playing it safe.“
On his 40th birthday trip with friends, my husband sent me a picture of a paragraph from a book I gave him for Father’s Day the previous summer. He’s not a big reader, but sitting on a Dominican beach waiting for me to join him, he had finally started reading the Chip Gaines book I had given him several months earlier.
“This is so me,” he texted along with the paragraph where Chip described the joy and satisfaction he gets from working with his hands.
Today, as I pulled out the book to try to find the exact quote for this blog post, I found the note I wrote to him for Father’s Day stuck within its pages. Among other things, the note said, “I’m committed to whatever direction you feel God is leading you and us in, but I don’t ever want you to shy away from something because of lack of confidence or fear. Like he says in one of these books, ‘fear dressed up as wisdom provides very poor counsel.’ Let’s move forward with faith instead of fear, trusting God to lead us. I love you.”
You see, we’d been fighting a lot over the last year or so because he was working in a job and career that was making him miserable. I’m prone to catch on to misery quicker than he does, but he was finally starting to begin to admit it himself.
Although he loved- and still does- so many of the people he had the privilege of working with as well as aspects of the work, a variety of factors were leading to misery. One of which, I would realize later, was that although some of the people he led as a healthcare administrator got to work with their hands regularly, he didn’t. And he was at work so much, and devoted to spending time with our kids if he wasn’t, that he never got to heed the good advice of sabbathing with his hands because he worked with his mind. There wasn’t time to.
He’s one to grit his teeth and bare it, being brought up to believe that hard work- whether you like that work or not- is what makes you have worth and value. I had wanted him to quit for over a year, confident we could make it work financially if he did. But he was no “quitter.”
He was and is a smart, good looking guy (I know I’m biased, but he is). He is by all standards a privileged white male. He could do whatever he wanted.
No one ever told him growing up, “You know, you should find work that involves working with your hands because you seem to like to do that.” He didn’t take shop or any Career Tech classes for that matter in high school because he was taking all Advanced Placement ones. His GPA, ACT, and GMAT scores pointed him towards careers where he would sit behind a desk and or in meetings almost all day everyday and lead people. The whole world was telling him this was his path to success.
It was pretty easy for him to get there. He hardly studied for the GMAT and scored in the top 25%. Getting into graduate school to earn a Masters in Health Administration and an MBA wasn’t difficult for him. Did he enjoy doing it? Was he able to use his God given gifts and passions? Who knows? No one had ever said to him nor had he said to himself that that was the point or even a consideration.
But what had been so “easy” to get to had become unbearably hard because he hated it. A week after Father’s Day when I wrote that note, the decision was made. He would no longer have to grit his teeth and bare it. He’d been given the chance to figure out a route that hopefully would be more fulfilling and desirable, more prone to how he is designed.
By the 40th birthday trip, he’d taken some time to process and plan his next steps and self reflect, helping him realize what he needed. What he could offer. The path, whether the world told him he was crazy or not, involved working with his hands a whole lot more.
Of the two points I think I want to make in this post, one is this: in a world with multiple career paths, we often point others and ourselves down the wrong ones because we don’t allow them and ourselves to figure out what makes us tick. I think the general assumption has been we do this the most to those who are less privileged. To those that have to get a job to make ends meet, whatever job that may be. However miserable the job may be.
While this is certainly true, I think we do it just as much at the very opposite end of the spectrum. To the ones that seemingly have all the options in the world because of their privilege. Such is the misery of the smart, attractive white male. We decide for them and they decide based on what the world says successful careers are. All of which involve professional degrees and dress pants. And if we are honest, the privileged still live in a world where the stereotype is that successful men need to be in careers where their wife can stay home and raise kids and keep domestic life for a family running. Where she can work if she wants to, but heaven forbid would have to. It’s a different pressure than having to choose a job to be able to put food on the table, but it is actually of the same vein. Pressure to earn regardless of the cost.
But for my husband, the work all this led to was difficult in the form of it being a little bit like slow torture. It hadn’t always been like that, but the last time I had remembered talking to him at work and it sounded like he was enjoying it was when he called me back after being up the ceiling of an operating room trying to figure out why there was a leak. “You were up in the ceiling? In your dress pants?” I asked, “Isn’t there someone else that is supposed to do that?”
“I wanted to see it for myself,” he said. “I wanted to fix it.”
He wanted to fix it with his own two hands. Not just his mind. He’d been solving so many problems over the past 15 years with his mind and his hands were desperate to be put to use.
He still solves a lot of problems with his mind now, but he gets to use his hands to implement those solutions. And he is happier. And our family is happier. And by His hands, we are still fed. We have never been anywhere close to having to go without our daily bread.
Now, a year and half after this transition, he’s away this week fixing flooring at an investment property we have. (Not paying someone to fix the floors was another source of fighting for us until I realized doing it on his own was much like being in that operating room ceiling. He needed to do it with his own two hands. He needed to fix it himself.)
Earlier this year, he turned a house into a home for a family that had been living in a hotel for over two years. In a world where those who have made mistakes in the past can’t get financing or a chance to rent a decent home, he decided to change that. One property and one family at a time.
He built a swing set out back for their young kids to play on. “They need to be able to play outside,” he said. And then he went about building. Not buying a swing set kit to set up, but building a swing set with no plans, just his two hands working with his mind.
And for my second key point of this post and of what this whole post was originally designed to be about, he’s redone our home office. He designed it with his mind, and every single thing in the office he built himself from scratch with his own two hands. And it is beautiful. And functional.
Here are a couple of sneak peek pictures of it, but it will be featured on a new website he is “building” to showcase, in part, the work of his hands. The site is a little bit real estate, a little bit travel, and a whole lot of our family’s journey to capture what makes spaces and places home. We will post the full feature of the website next week as it goes live with advice on how to design a home office, or any office for that matter, without taking the home out of it.
BEFOREBy “his” handsAFTER
As you move into your work week, I hope you’ll take some time to think about what makes you tick and if that is provided at all in the work you do day in and day out. Do you get to build your equivalent of swings sets and office spaces? Because if you aren’t, you most likely aren’t building beautiful things that end up helping others live and work well either. It is a courageous and loving act instead of the fearful one. We all need to figure out what makes us tick, not because it is self-serving, but precisely because it is the exact opposite.
By his hands, my husband is serving, and by His hands, a gracious God has moved our transition that was plagued with fear and expectations of what we are supposed to do to one where we are doing what we are meant to do.
So when Pat McAfee made his appearance on Gameday this year to replace a former Georgia football player that looked really good in a suit (more my jam), I was like what the heck?
I watched him for a minute, determined he was there to sensationalize, pull in a different type of audience, and create some new dynamic I wasn’t into. I thought I’d lost a little bit of respect for the Saturday morning football institution, even if Corso is still there picking his favorite team, glorified mascot head and all.
But my husband keeps showing me clips of McAfee’s show. (To note, tank tops aren’t my husband’s jam either. He’s even more buttoned up than I am when it comes to stuff like that.)
“You’ve got to watch this,” he’s said at least three times to me in the past two weeks. Usually when he says this, it is because he’s watched it and he knows I am going to take some organizational psychology/leadership lessons from it and run with it.
As I’ve watched, the popular host isn’t really sensationalizing anything- unless you take into account his frequent foul language- which is also, you guessed it, not my jam. He’s teaching leadership and organizational psychology 101. Lessons I try to teach myself and others each day. Like:
“Take care of your people.” Pay people what they are worth. You trying to short change everyone around you only leads to you short changing yourself.
Stand up for what you believe in and don’t back down when people criticize you for it. Ignore the outside “noise” both the good and the bad.
“Humility drives you to success.”
You have to customize your leadership to the people you are leading.
Humor helps. Deploy it often.
Surround yourself with the GOATs of the world and listen to them. Learn from them. As I’ve watched and not just listened to the show, you see how attuned McAfee is to listening to his guests. He’s not silently interrupting- trying to think about what he is going to say next while someone else is talking- and he’s not literally interrupting either. He’s sitting there with his ears and mind on and he’s soaking it all in.
If you want to listen to the episodes that my husband keeps putting in front of me, here is the two most recent examples:
During the pandemic, it was estimated that between two and three million women left the workforce. While there are signs that women are returning towards pre-pandemic levels, there are still a variety of sectors, especially care workers, that have not recovered and signs don’t point to an optimistic outcome.
Why?
Women are largely those that leave the workforce to provide care for children and or the elderly. Providing care makes it difficult for women to work, especially in more traditional sectors where workers must be present and work hours that don’t align with school and care options. This is especially true for single mothers.
What should be done? There are many thoughtful people across the country that are working on this issue. As you think about how your company and or community can support labor participation among women by tackling caregiving needs, here are some things to think about:
What is it that workers actually need and want when it comes to childcare? In order to address caregiving, we must address quality and quantity and respond to what workers want and need when it comes to childcare. For example, the West Alabama area has realized that blue collar workers want their childcare close to where they live, not close to where they work. Whereas one solution would be for large manufacturing companies to build onsite childcare facilities, this would neglect to understand what the population they employ needs and prefers. So they have launched an initiative to increase in-home daycares in their community. You can learn more about their program in this Family or Group Childcare Homes Workbook.
In addition, employers across the state are looking into options like Tootris to provide a customized approach to childcare instead of a one size fits all approach (and most likely saving millions by outsourcing the access to childcare). In this model, Tootris helps families find childcare that meets their needs through an online network and then the employer provides a financial subsidy to the employee through Tootris to help pay for that childcare.
Finally, we also need to consider what people need when it comes to carrying not only for children, but also for aging and/or disabled loved ones. Often, this is largely left out of the discussion when seeking to address the labor participation issue.
It is an affordability issue. Systems like Tootris provide a means for employers to help offset the cost of childcare. And to be sure, quality child care is expensive. My youngest child just transitioned from a high-quality childcare program to a public school Pre-K and what we paid for that childcare now almost pays the mortgage on our home each month.
Some states are getting involved to try to figure out how public-private partnerships can make an impact on labor participation through subsidizing the cost of childcare. The state of Indiana proposed splitting the cost of childcare in thirds- employers paying one third, employees paying one third and the state paying one third. Although this legislation has not passed in Indiana, the research behind it showed that the state would more than offset the cost through increased payroll taxes being collected by those that were able to return or enter the workforce because their childcare needs were now met.
We need to examine what it means to work and when and how we structure education with working parents in mind. I mentioned that my youngest child transitioned into a public school Pre-K. While this is saving us over $800 a month, he now has to be picked up by 2:15 pm each day. Given he is in Pre-K, he is too young to go to the school’s extended day program. My husband and I are fortunate to have flexibility when it comes to working hours and we have retired grandparents available around the corner from the school we can call on when needed. My issues, to be sure, come from a place of unique privilege. But when we think about childcare, we have to stop and realize that school days and work days don’t often align when it comes to hours and schedules. My school aged children are out of school now for fall break- five days- and will be out of school a total of seven days before December (not counting Christmas Break). People working in traditional fields do not have access to seven days off in less than a two month period.
I don’t have the solutions for this issue, but we need to be talking about it. Employers need to consider what it actually means to get quality work done, and oftentimes we are too rigid on when and how this takes place. Communities and school systems need to work with employers to consider the demands placed on working parents when every time you turn around, kids are out of school and the hours in which they go to school aren’t consistent with a traditional work day. Our workplaces would be better off and our schools would too because families would be better supported.
What are you seeing that is helping to address labor participation due to caregiving issues?
Here at The Point Blog, we have been writing a series. Last month, I gave an overview of What’s Affecting the Labor Force Participation Rate? Lorrie followed that up with When Working Costs too Much concerning the benefits cliff and Taylor took a closer look at Baby Boomers Retiring-How do we fill their shoes? This week, I am going to take a deeper dive into some of the reasons that males (age 25-54) are evaporating from Labor Force Participation and some possible solutions for our future workforce.
The Labor Force Participation Rate is defined as those who are actively looking for or seeking work. According to Male Labor Force Participation: Patterns and Trends there are multiple reasons that males of prime age aren’t seeking employment. Among those reasons are a shift in U.S. industry structure, a decline in male educational attainment, delayed family formation, the rise of substance abuse, and heavy use of video games.
How can we address the deficit and encourage male workers to get back into the workforce? Read what the Demographic Drought research has to say about solutions to our workforce future.
Recruit beyond traditional demographics-HR directors will need to look into recruiting people that normally would have been overlooked as candidates to fill vacant positions.
Reskilling, upskilling, and alignment-Companies can’t assume they’ll be able to find the right talent. Instead, they must build that talent base for themselves. By working with higher ed to build programs that meet the needs of the job market, offering upskilling or reskilling opportunities to current employees, and providing on-the-job training for new recruits, businesses can close or at least narrow their talent gaps.
Retain students and employees-Colleges and universities must focus on retention, not just enrollment. Similarly, businesses must focus on retaining current employees, not just hiring.
In conclusion, we need to value people more. At Horizon Point, we offer a two-day intensive workshop uniquely designed to help business and community leaders examine workplaces of the past and present and explore high-impact solutions for creating workplaces and a workforce for the future. Learn more about our Illuminate content, here.
